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Interview with Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

In Conversation with Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Set in parallel threads across these two cities, Lahore is a behind-the-scenes look into the negotiations and the political skulduggery that gave India its freedom, the price for which was batwara.

Backed by astute research, Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s The Partition Trilogy captures the frenzy of Indian independence, the Partition and the accession of the states, and takes readers back to a time of great upheaval and churn. Here we are in conversation with the author:

 

Q. An IIM-alumnus, you studied to be an engineer – how did writing come about? 

A. Writing snuck upon me in the guise of a tai tai, a Chinese colloquial term for a woman of leisure. Perched atop a Singapore high-rise, at the turn of the millennium, I was to take a sabbatical from the life of a corporate road warrior and indulge in some ‘me’ time. On my way to realising this barmy prospect in sunny Singapore, I collided with the plains of Punjab. Rather, its fields. That grew mustard and wheat and rice and, for a period in the eighties, militants. Which made my little town on the Indo-Pak border a militant hotbed. And images started to swim up, of a time that I had left behind, or so I thought…

I tried to resist. After all, I was jobless by choice, unbridled by motherhood, ready to explore a shiny first-world city! But the neat white Ikea table in my newly-set-up study drew me in repeatedly. There I’d sit after my husband left for office, with my second cup of tea, and memories that rose unbidden, like the fragrance of the night-blooming jasmine in the garden of our home in Ferozepur. All right, I determined, I would offload those memories onto my PC and be done with them. I was naive. One memory led to another, then another, a labyrinth opening up for me to wade in. That period of my life came back to me with the kind of hi-fidelity reproduction enthusiasts wax about.

To make sense of those memories I started asking questions. My research took me back in time and it was the national library, not any salon, that became my haunt. Seven years later, I had a book: The Long Walk Home.

Q. Your brand-new The Partition Trilogy comes in a long line of brilliant books about the partition of India. What makes it different? What prompted you to write about one of the most painful events in public memory? 

 

A. The partition of the subcontinent was a monumental event which resulted in the largest human migration in modern history. Yet, concomitant as it is with Indian independence, partition has been pushed to the margins of our collective history. There have been some fine chronicles of the time period but not nearly enough. Fictional recounting of partition is even more scarce. This dearth of storytelling was evident to me in the border town I grew up in where every household had a story to tell and yet, my history books had none to show.

The great Hilary Mantel argues that “facts are not the truth but the record of what’s left on the record. It is up to the living to interpret those accounts.” All my writing has been an attempt to bring to paper stories I grew up with, stories that spoke of an undivided land and time, stories that I didn’t find in books I read.

Whilst researching and writing The Partition Trilogy, a two-decade engagement, I had two specific goals. One was to put faces on the ones who loved and lived and lost in that cataclysm, especially women who suffered the worst and were obscured in the interstices of history. Second was to faithfully, with great historical accuracy, render the multiple dilemmas faced by our leaders as the charger of time galloped to 15 August. In essence, to put the leaders and ordinary people on the same stage.

Partition is not our past, it is resonating loudly in our present. It asks us not to sentimentalise the past but to interrogate it, to ask tough questions, to unearth the truth so that we may reconcile and heal. The Partition Trilogy is an attempt in that direction.

 

Q. You’re no stranger to historical fiction – your previous novels such as The Radiance of a Thousand Suns and The Long Walk Home were also set in recent history. What is it about the genre that attracts you?  

A. Lahore/Laur is the land of my elders. It is my virsa. In the riverine border town where I grew up, Lahore had been left behind on the other side of the Sutlej in 1947. But like any true love, it never left us. Its fragrance was in my father’s language, my uncle’s stories, my mother’s Pak dramas, in the ghazals floating every evening in our house, transmitted by PTV. It was present in my town’s countless tales with the same denouement: Partition.

In the new millennium, history has become contested territory. In India today, Partition is resonating again. As we approach its 75th anniversary, there are at least two generations with little to no inkling of that cataclysm. How do we as a people progress and move forward until we understand and make peace with our past? Excellent time for fine historical fiction.

 

Q. You currently live in New York City, USA. Did the ongoing pandemic affect your research for any of the book in the trilogy, Lahore, Hyderabad or Kashmir?

A. I owe an immense debt to the libraries that have supported my two-decade quest as I have researched this period. Beginning with the Singapore National Library, followed by the Hong Kong Public Library, and now the New York Public Library. Libraries and librarians are invaluable, something that has been brought home to me with renewed clarity as the pandemic lockdown halted my regular library visits and the New York Public Library came to my rescue.

NYPL invited me to join their prestigious research scholars program whereby books and research material I needed was mailed to me at home, or scanned and emailed to me. I cannot be more grateful to them because many books I need for my ongoing research and writing are rare and unavailable in the public domain, even if one could buy those.

 

Q. Sepoy Malik, Tara, Beli Ram, Mehmood, Pammi. So many lives, so many stories. It is uncommon for fiction about India’s independence to merge the bigger picture at such an obvious and grand scale. Why did you choose to juxtapose the two? Can we expect more of these minor, non-political characters in the other books too?

Whilst the big decisions about what to give and what to keep were being taken by the political leaders in Delhi, the common people (never minor) living in the land being contested were not consulted. So many lives and loves were sacrificed in the orgy of violence that followed Partition.

What are we to do with these individual stories flattened by the road roller of history?

I tussled with this question and finally found my answer in a technique called “Critical fabulation”, coined by American writer Saidiya Hartman. In The Partition Trilogy, across the three books, I use a style of creative semi-nonfiction that attempts to bring the suppressed voices of the past to the surface by means of hard research and scattered facts.

Readers will meet the characters introduced in Lahore, Book 1, in the following two books as well. Psst: Astute readers will be able to glean some characters from my previous novel, The Radiance of a Thousand Suns, as well!

 

Q. Can you tell us a little about the second book in The Partition Trilogy, Hyderabad?

Hyderabad, Book 2 in The Partition Trilogy, is set in the months following India’s independence and Partition when the two largest princely states — Hyderabad and Kashmir — were yet to be integrated into the new nation state.

As with Lahore, the narrative is set in two parallel threads: In Delhi, the capital city of newly-independent India; the other in Hyderabad, the largest princely state which has proclaimed its independence come 15 August 1947. The Delhi thread features the same three main protagonists as Book 1, Lahore: Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of independent India, Vallabhbhai Patel, its Home Minister and Deputy PM; and Dickie Mountbatten as the first governor-general. The Hyderabad thread features the prickly Nizam and his inner circle, the rabble-rouser Razvi, and ordinary citizens, primarily a woman in the employment of the Nizam, and another who is a recent Communist recruit.

Hyderabad is a roller coaster ride involving on-off negotiations between Delhi and Hyderabad, delaying tactics of the Nizam, the looming shadow of Jinnah, as flights between Karachi and Hyderabad carry weapons led by a buccaneering Australian aviator, trucks are loaded with precious jewels, and a deepening chasm between the elite and the masses sunders the State…

Get your copy of the first in The Partition Trilogy, Lahore!

Lahore
About the Book - Lahore

In the months leading up to Independence, in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel are engaged in deliberations with British Viceroy Dickie Mountbatten over the fate of the country. In Lahore, Sepoy Malik returns home from the Great War hoping…

To read more, order your copy of Lahore, by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar today!

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